Arne B. Larson

Born into a musical family on a southern Minnesota farm in 1904, Arne B. Larson began playing a clarinet of Spanish-American War vintage at the age of five. During the Great Depression in the 1930's, he worked his way through the Minneapolis College of Music. He taught first in Little Falls, MN, and then in International Falls, MN. In 1943 he became band and orchestra director at Brookings High School. After World War II, he would take the train on Saturdays to Arlington, Lake Preston, and other nearby towns in South Dakota, to tune pianos all day long. He used this hard-earned money to send tea and spam to British collectors in exchange for antique musical instruments. Later, Larson drove for many years around South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota, presenting his program for schools, churches, and service clubs, during which he played 50 different instruments. He also traveled around the country for the American Scandinavian Association in Washington, D.C., and made national public television appearances on the popular children' program, a "Mr. Rogers'Neighborhood." In 1966, Larson was hired as Professor of Music at the University of South Dakota (USD) in Vermillion, bringing his collection of more than 2,500 rare musical instruments from around the world along. He later donated them, along with the family farm, to help establish the National Music Museum in 1973. Arne Larson also founded and directed "The Golden Age of Bands 1860-1915," an ensemble that played American band music from the Civil War ere to World War I on original instruments from that time period. Today, the National Music Museum is the preeminent institution of its kind. Its collections of more than 13,500 American, European, and non-Western instruments, dating from the 16th century to the present, make USD the leading center in the world for scholarly study of the history of musical instruments.